In my last post, I concentrated on the new enhancements to WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0.0.2. One of the major new additions was the introduction of Environment Profiles, and I promised a developerWorks article would be forthcoming. The article is now live along with a demo that showcases the capability of environment profiles.

As I mentioned in my last post, environment profiles center around giving you more customization capability during the pattern deployment process. In WebSphere CloudBurst, the pattern deployment process consists of the five main steps depicted below.

Traditionally, WebSphere CloudBurst controlled the entire deployment process, thus closing it off to the deployer. Environment profiles extend the customization reach of users to be able to effect steps 1-3 in the above diagram. Specifically, environment profiles give you the following control:

Control over the assignment of IP addresses and hostnames to pattern parts: Instead of having WebSphere CloudBurst automatically assign IP addresses, and thus hostnames, to virtual machines during deployment, you can explicitly set both values during the deployment process.

Ability to deploy single patterns to multiple cloud groups: Previously, when deploying a pattern you selected a single cloud group and WebSphere CloudBurst deployed all the parts in the pattern to machines within that cloud group. While this may be okay for many cases, other cases may require you to deploy some parts of the pattern to one group of machines while other parts map to a separate set of machines. Before environment profiles, you could accomplish this with multiple patterns. With environment profiles, you can accomplish it with a single pattern.

Ability to supply virtual machine naming standards: As part of deploying a pattern, WebSphere CloudBurst creates one to many virtual machines with distinct names. Environment profiles allow you to supply a naming standard that WebSphere CloudBurst will use when creating the machines as opposed to default naming schemes previously used.

It is important to note that the use of environment profiles is completely optional, and you can continue to use the traditional deployment process, thereby leaving WebSphere CloudBurst in control. That said, the introduction of environment profiles is a direct response to consistent user feedback we received regarding the need for more control during the deployment process. Based on my user conversations, these profiles address many of said needs in an easy to use, straightforward manner. We are, of course, eager to know what you think. As always, you can let me know right here, through email, or on Twitter (@damrhein).

Virtual image parts play a huge role in WebSphere CloudBurst. When crafting your own customized patterns, you include anywhere from 1 to n parts from as many different virtual images as is necessary. These parts represent the different node types or personalities within a given Hypervisor Edition image, and form the basis of your pattern. When you deploy a pattern, such as the one pictured below, WebSphere CloudBurst creates a distinct virtual machine for each part.

This means that after deploying the above WebSphere Application Server pattern, you will have four virtual machines comprising your virtual system. This gives you a clean separation of concern by providing a unique container for each of your application environment nodes. This can attribute to performance optimization, increased availability, and much more. However, this approach is not suitable to all use cases. In some scenarios, especially when trying to control costs and increase consolidation, you may want to deploy a multi-node WebSphere Application Server environment within a single virtual machine. Based on what I showed you above, you might think our approach in WebSphere CloudBurst makes this impossible, but you would be overlooking an important component of patterns.

That component is of course the second building block of patterns... script packages. As you probably know, script packages allow you to supply just about any customization you want. In the case that you want a single virtual machine to host a number of WebSphere Application Server nodes, maybe even an entire cell, all you need to do is supply a script package that constructs the necessary nodes during deployment. In fact, you don't even have to write the script package. You can use the free sample in our samples gallery. As seen in the pattern below, you include this script package on a sole deployment manager part in a pattern.

The script script package provides parameters that define the node name, number of custom nodes, and number of web server nodes you want in your cell. During the deployment process, the script takes this information and constructs the cell you define. This includes creating the custom and web servers nodes and federating the custom nodes, thus completing the creation of your WebSphere Application Server cell. In this case, the script package provides deployment flexibility that is sometimes a necessity, and it is just another example of the many degrees of flexibility enabled by the script package design.

I should point out that a part in a pattern does not always map to a single node. For instance, in the case of WebSphere Process Server, there is a part that represents a complete, multi-node golden topology encapsulated within a single virtual machine. However, if you find yourself using images that do not contain these multi-node parts, rest easy knowing script packages provide you the flexibility you need.

Usually when I am discussing WebSphere CloudBurst with clients, the subject of tracking usage comes up. While 'tracking usage' is pretty broad and could apply to any number of things, we often come back to two major concepts. First, users want to be able to track compute resource usage in the WebSphere CloudBurst cloud, as this helps in cloud capacity planning. Second, users want to be able to track usage by individual WebSphere CloudBurst users in order to facilitate chargeback. In both cases, WebSphere CloudBurst provides reports that help you.

When it comes to tracking compute resource usage in your WebSphere CloudBurst cloud, the appliance provides a set of pre-defined reports on the Cloud --> Machine Activity page.

As you can see from the snapshot above, WebSphere CloudBurst provides usage reports for both memory and CPU attributed to either individual hypervisors or virtual machines. In addition, the appliance tracks storage usage by device and IP usage in your cloud. For each report type, you can specify a desired date range and let WebSphere CloudBurst produce a graph showing usage over that time. The below picture shows the report for memory usage by hypervisor over a one month period.

Tracking compute resource usage is certainly important, but if your interests are mostly about using WebSphere CloudBurst to facilitate chargeback, you likely want to know about our user reports. You can find these reports on the Cloud --> User Activity page of the appliance. On this page, you will find a table that lists each user and their usage of virtual machines, CPUs, memory, and storage over a period of time that you specify. Further, you can download a comma separated value file that contains this data for further parsing or processing on your part. The image below shows an example of the user activity table.

In addition to the user usage data provided above, many WebSphere CloudBurst users find that they want to track the amount of time users had running virtual systems deployed through WebSphere CloudBurst. While the appliance does not provide a direct report with this information, you can use this free sample to calculate virtual system duration times. This free tool uses data available in the WebSphere CloudBurst audit log (data you can process to produce any custom report you need), and it calculates virtual system duration time as well as virtual system time attributed to each user. You use the WebSphere CloudBurst CLI to invoke this tool, providing it with your start and end dates for the calculation (you can find further invocation instructions inside the ZIP file containing the tool). The image below shows example output for both the virtual system duration and user virtual system time reports.

'Tracking usage' means many different things to different people and use cases. I hope the above information regarding usage tracking in WebSphere CloudBurst gives you a good idea of what you get out of the box, as well as what you can do by using the audit log (in a similar fashion to the free tool mentioned above). If you have any questions, requests, or feedback, please let me know.

Looking for a reminder of the difference a year can make? If so, just take a look at the last year or so for the WebSphere CloudBurst product. Since about this time last year, we have seen the release of versions 1.1, 1.1.1, 2.0, and 2.0.0.2, each one bringing their own set of major enhancements and features. Owing to this aggressive pace, it is sometimes easy to miss out on the latest capabilities of the product. For that reason, I wanted to give a brief rundown of some (definitely not all) of the major additions to WebSphere CloudBurst over the past year.

PowerVM and z/VM support: WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 introduced support for PowerVM (based on Power5 and Power6 systems), and version 1.1.1 introduced support for z/VM. This means that a single WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance can provision to VMware, PowerVM, and z/VM virtualization platforms.

Expansion of the IBM Hypervisor Edition portfolio: The portfolio of images that you can deploy using WebSphere CloudBurst now includes WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Portal Server, WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Message Broker, and DB2. In addition to adding new images, we also expanded the platform and operating system support for existing images. For example, you can take advantage of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS for WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, and you can deploy WebSphere Process Server Hypervisor Edition to z/VM infrastructure.

Addition of the Intelligent Management Pack: The Intelligent Management Pack is an optional feature of the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition that allows you to take advantage of autonomic, policy-driven runtime management capabilities in your deployed environments. This includes the ability to create proactive health policies for your environments, assign SLAs to your applications, manage the update of applications, and more.

License management capabilities: In WebSphere CloudBurst version 2.0 and later, you can make use of license monitoring and management functionality. This allows you to get both point-in-time and historical views of software PVU usage within your cloud, and it allows you to setup policies concerning the usage of PVUs for WebSphere CloudBurst deployments.

Environment profiles: WebSphere CloudBurst provides quite a bit of out-of-the-box deployment automation in terms of selecting hypervisors, assigning IP addresses, and more. However, sometimes you need more control over exactly how this happens. WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0.0.2 introduced environment profiles that you can use to exercise more control over how deployment happens in WebSphere CloudBurst.

In my view, this is quite an impressive list of features delivered within a year's time. I should also reiterate that this is by no means a complete list, but just a selection of some of the major enhancements during this time. If you have any questions about the above additions, or if you have any questions on other features, please let me know.